In a little while they went back together into the parlor hand in hand. Chris Jennifer’s wife was standing with her back to them, posing herself before a little old mirror with a bright piece of stuff—pink roses upon a green ground—folded about her bosom. She turned with a start, and whisked the thing away as though shy of a piece of matronly vanity. “Why, Mrs. Winnie, you have picked out the very thing!” “Me, sir? I was only trying how my little lady would look in it gathered up over the breast—just so, Mr. John.” “But I bought that piece of stuff for you, Mrs. Winnie.” “Now, come, my dear good gentleman—me with pink roses!” “Well, I should praise you in it.” “Pink roses and a face like a side of bacon! Dear soul, but it be too young for me.” Barbara went to her suddenly, and, taking the stuff, unfolded it, and held it to Mrs. Jennifer’s figure. And in truth she looked comely with the sweet colors of it, turning her coy, brusque face this way and that with self-conscious pride. “You look like a bride, Mrs. Jennifer.” “Go along with you, Mr. John, you be as bad as the rest of them with your tongue. But, by my soul, dearie, it do look sweet!” XLII It would almost seem that Stephen Gore was a little mad those first few days in Thorn, what with the fever of a chill he had taken in the saddle, the utter ghostliness and melancholy of the place, and the cold, raw mists that hung about the moat. The cold went to his marrow and the sinister solitude of the house to his brain, for at night Thorn was a veritable goblin castle where a man might imagine all manner of dim horrors. The wind made strange noises and whisperings of dismay; plaster crumbled and fell; slants of moonlight sprang in as the clouds drifted over the moon; the ivy rattled on the walls; worm-eaten beams creaked and cracked; and the wind was everywhere like a haunted spirit. Stephen Gore had found only one candle left in the place; it had lasted him but one night, so that when the dusk fell he had no light but the light of the fire. And he would lie awake on the couch in the kitchen, the hot blood simmering in his brain, and a sweat of shivering fear on him, while he fancied that he heard voices in the thickness of the walls and a sound as of things moving in the darkness. However dainty and superfine a man may be, his flesh takes command of his spirit when the smaller necessities of life fall to his own hands. It would have delighted some of the cynics of Whitehall to have seen this fine gentleman in his shirt-sleeves splitting firewood with pitiful clumsiness, and disciplining his stomach in an attempt to boil salt beef. For Stephen Gore was repeating some of the experiences of a Selkirk, save that his solitude was of his own seeking, and yet not a matter of choice.